Scientists Strive To Save Species Still Undiscovered

September 21, 1986|By Erik Eckholm, New York Times News Service.

NEW YORK — LEADING BIOLOGISTS, fearful that a significant share of living species will disappear before they are even discovered, are escalating their efforts to save tropical rain forests and other imperiled ecosystems.

With recent indications that fewer than one-tenth of the earth`s species of plants and animals have been identified, much less studied for scientific lessons or economic utility, biologists are also calling for a new age of natural exploration, a crash effort to find and study millions of species before they are wiped out.

In recent decades, these scientists say, dramatic progress in molecular biology has stolen status and resources from the task of describing and comparing different forms of life. Too few scientists today are trained in taxonomy, the systematic ordering of species.

Yet knowledge of species diversity is the foundation of ecological understanding, they assert, and also provides the essential raw materials for new genetic engineering technologies. Time is short, they add, because as tropical forests, the most diverse ecosystems on earth, are cleared, thousands of species are possibly being lost each year.

``It`s astonishing that something as basic and important as the amount of diversity of life on earth is largely unmapped,`` said Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University.

``We don`t even know the number of species to the nearest order of magnitude,`` Wilson lamented, observing that plausible estimates range from 5 million to 30 million. Only about 1.6 million species have been described by scientists so far.

Wilson, an expert on insects and on sociobiology, the study of evolutionary influences on behavior, is one of several leading biologists who have recently entered the political arena to battle for worldwide conservation.

They are especially alarmed by trends in the tropics, where once-vast rain forests are giving way to farms, ranches and logging enterprises in what critics say are often ill-planned development policies.

``In the past, many biologists thought it was almost unscientific to get too involved in conservation politics,`` said Thomas E. Lovejoy, vice president of the World Wildlife Fund in Washington. ``But no more. The rate of loss is suddenly dawning on people.``

While concerns voiced in the last decade that all rain forests would be stripped by the century`s end have proved overstated, experts say, within a few decades the destruction will be almost total in some regions, such as Central America and West Africa, and it is spreading inexorably in the Amazon, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

In their effort to curb forest damages and to promote establishment of more nature reserves, biologists have found themselves treading into unfamiliar territory.

They have begun, for example, to join forces with environmental activists to scrutinize the policies of aid agencies like the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development, whose loans for agriculture or forestry in developing countries can influence whether lands are developed rationally or ravaged.

In a manifestation of the sharp rise in concern, next week in Washington the National Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution will host a National Forum on Biodiversity. Dozens of leading scientists will discuss the current knowledge of species diversity and strategies for safeguarding it.

Most of the undocumented, endangered species are insects, and many of the rest are other invertebrates or plants. The plight of beetles and weeds does not engender the same public sympathies that whales, eagles or pandas do.

Yet the small, obscure creatures, scientists observe, are the foundation of intricate webs that ultimately support all life, including humans. An insect may be vital for pollinating or defending an important species of tree, while a disappearing plant can take with it many interdependent species such as insects and higher animals.

Each species, whether charming to most humans or not, is a unique repository of enormous genetic and ecological information. Furthermore, notes Jared M. Diamond, an ecologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, ``you never know when one will prove to be of economic value, or a menace we should know about.``

Asked by a group of theologians what his studies had revealed, the late J.B.S. Haldane, a prominent British biologist, reportedly said that the Creator had ``an inordinate fondness for beetles.`` Recent findings suggest that this was an understatement.

About half the 1.6 million described species are insects, with beetles the biggest subgroup of these. Biologists have long assumed that hundreds of thousands if not millions more insects awaited discovery, largely because every time they studied a new patch of rain forest they found many new species.

New exploration of what some describe as the major uncharted biological frontier, the canopy level of rain forests, provides evidence that the number of insect species is much higher than previously imagined.